Yo-Yo Logic

by Lauren Shapiro

"There is a kind of alluring, cosmic deadpan to these poems that deftly unveils our contemporary experience of its peculiar and sometimes even Romantic wonders. Playful and impulsive, mirthful and marauding, a little reckless and a lot wry, Lauren Shapiro sees right through the world and feels it deeply with a heart full of butter. Welcome to the gingerbread house. You won't leave hungry." --Dobby Gibson "To all you jaded poetry hipsters out there, I double-dog dare you to read Lauren Shapiro's YO-YO LOGIC and not fall passionately and unironically in love with these poems' sly sincerity and hawk-eyed humor. Go ahead, try." --Nick Lantz "I've lived / on the edge of an abyss that doesn't even exist," deadpans the canny speaker of this book of bent syllogisms, whose every line upends the sly logic of the line before. With her feet on the "moving floor" of contemporary culture, and her head buzzing with "a love of theory in which the proposition never / leads to the conclusion," Lauren Shapiro is a master of the declarative sentence, the wisecrack that cracks the doors of perception just enough to glimpse an infinite horizon beyond the umbrella-filled drinks at the chi-chi bar." --Suzanne Buffam

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[cheeseblab · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do you have a poet friend? If not, get one. If so, support him or her. Yes, that means going to readings, reading drafts of poems if asked, buying the little magazines that publish your friend's work, and, if he or she is good and lucky enough to have a solo publication, buying that and telling other people to buy it. 'Cause seriously, apart from hip-hop artists (and I'll grant, that's a significant exception), the unacknowledged legislators of the world get less acknowledgment these days than they ever have, and that is sad.

I'm lucky, because my poet friend is very, very good at it. When I met her, she was an exceptionally talented young poet. She's still young, and she's still talented, but she has no need of the condescending adjectives now: she's simply an exceptional poet. Most of the poems here adopt a dream logic, and yeah, that's been done, a lot, but rarely with the sensitivity to the comic surreal world that you'll find here. Several times I laughed out loud, the kind of laughter that black-comedy works of war like Catch-22 or Dr. Strangelove elicit: you're having such a good time it's a while before you notice that your legs have been shot off.

At the dinner party I tell the story of the eye popping out,
and then someone else tells about finding an ear in the gutter
and everyone drinks more wine and Marty finally opens up
about his little brother losing a hand in a table saw
and Sarah admits that she once lost a nipple to a feral dog
and Tim, after some prodding, shows the empty area
where his testicles once hung. And then we walk home . . .

In these poems, anything worth having is worth losing, and probably will be, unless it's never had in the first place.

If Amy loves you, then Alice will bake a pie.
But Alice didn't bake a pie.
Therefore, moot point, no pie, no love, nothing. . . .
Once I'm in my place I start to believe
all the postmodern theories, signs and cosines,
pi, infinity, the artist formerly known as Prince.

It's a shrug against the nothing, but with a suggestion that, stuck in a nightmare we're not apt to escape in once piece, maybe shrugging is the most sensible strategy: "Deep in the cake / hides a plastic doll. Who put it there, / and who on earth wants to find it?"

[Dieter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the coherence of Lauren's poems and that when she introduces a thread, she is likely to bring me back to it several times, often in creative, thought-building ways. I like the terms of her engagement. I like the economy and rhythm of her poems; they draw me out emotionally and are very responsive for a reader. I gobbled them up and am looking forward to more.